ISPs slam attempts to reveal alleged file sharers

UK Internet service providers have slammed attempts by the music industry to persuade them to give up the identities of alleged file sharers. The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA), an umbrella organisation for UK ISPs, described a letter by the BPI to two of its members, Tiscali and Bulldog, as 'detrimental to the spirit of co-operation' that the Internet industry wants to foster with the music business. While insisting that it does not support 'abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft', the ISPA said that its members would be acting outside the law if they co-operated with BPI demands. ...more

EC eyes single market for digital content

The European Commission has begun a public consultation on ways to stimulate the growth of an EU single market for online digital content including films, music and games. The Commission hopes to encourage the development of new business models and promote the cross-border delivery of online content services. The Western European online content sector already accounts for eight per cent of EU GDP and online content-sharing frameworks and markets are expected to triple by 2008. ...more

Tech companies lead UK patent rush

The UK patent office says it granted eight per cent more patents last year than in 2003, yet the numbers of patent applications is in decline. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of computing and electronics. For the category Electronic circuitry; telecommunications, 1,385 were published - a drop of 15 per cent - while 1635 were granted, up 21 per cent. ...more

Headphone styles affect your health

Two separate studies have found that the quality of headphones used with portable music players can have a significant impact on potential damage to hearing from prolonged listening. In one study, Cory Portnuff at the University of Colorado and Brian Fligor at Harvard Medical School discovered that supra-aural headphones - the kind that sit over the ear - produce slightly lower loudness than in-ear and canal headphones at the same volume setting. Their research led them to produce a table of maximum listening times, based on US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) damage-risk criteria. ...more

Sun goes open-source for single sign-on identity management

Sun is to open-source its single sign-on Java technologies for authenticating users remotely to a variety of websites and services. It will also open-source client-side software that connects and authenticates against the Sun Java System Web Server and Sun Java System Application Server. In order to drive development of these technologies, Sun has set up the Open Source Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project with the goal creating an extensible infrastructure for identity services including authentication, session and logging. ...more